UPDATE: According to Simon Butler, the Chief Commercial Officer at Vumatel, “The outage experienced in Johannesburg this morning was due to a broadcast storm, originating from a third party switch in our Vosloorus POP (Point of Presence). This has since been resolved and services have been fully restored.”
So, it seems for now, we can all rest a little easier as this outage doesn’t look like it will be an ongoing problem. But we will update you should that change.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: This morning, much of Gauteng and some parts of the Western Cape awoke to find they had lost all hope of being productive today. First, the load shedding and then Vumatel, one of the country’s leading internet service providers, suffered a widespread outage, meaning people all over Johannesburg and in some parts of Cape Town were unable to connect to the internet via their home internet.
Down Detector, a real-time problem and outage monitoring system, shows that fault reports started coming in at around 8:23 am. By 8:38 am that count had gone from 3 reports to 136, peaking at 580 reports by 8:53 am.
Vumatel restores connection (and hope)
The good news is that, at least for now, Vumatel reports that the problem has been resolved and that the connection to all areas has been restored and is stable. This is a welcome relief. Between the power outages and this network outage, having to buy cellular data can get rather expensive rather quickly. We think we can all agree that nobody needs any more expenses during a pandemic.
We reached out to Vumatel to provide any more info as to why the outage occurred and will update as soon as that info is available to us. Until then, let’s hope we only have to worry about one outage schedule.